When you’re building out the nuances of your messaging conversation list, you have to consider where avatars fit in.

3 Ways Avatars Improve Your Messaging Experience

As with any aspect of messaging, your use of avatars will depend on the needs of your customers.

However, there are 3 main ways that avatars can improve your messaging experience:

Improve “At a Glance” Convenience: Much like your choices in sorting messages and presenting conversation details, avatars are important components of “at a glance” convenience. When there is a distinctive avatar for each thread in the conversation list, your users can quickly scan and locate the messages they’re looking for.

Establishing Trust in the User Relationship: The internet breeds a sense of anonymity, but that doesn’t mean your digital customer experience has to follow. Adding a face to your interactions with customers can make a significant difference in user engagement. When customers see who they’re speaking with, they start to trust that person (and the brand), which can lead to better sales and lifetime value.

Additional Sorting Information: There are times when users don’t just want to filter their conversation threads by recent activity or unread messages. If your use case has customers opening multiple threads about multiple distinct products, it might help to use an avatar that indicates the subject of each conversation. Don’t think that your avatars always have to be pictures of users—they can come in a variety of forms.

Avatars Aren’t Just For the End-User

When we think about delivering a messaging experience to improve the customer experience, it’s easy to get too focused on the customer side. Avatars are also helpful on the agent side—especially when it’s your sales team interacting with customers.

Take a use case like Trunk Club, for example. When agents are responsible for multiple customer relationships, the conversation list can quickly become chaotic. Having avatars for each conversation can make it easier to locate the specific conversation the agent is looking for.

The easier it is for agents to identify which conversation belongs to each customer, the more effort they can spend making customers as happy as possible.

You build your messaging experience with the customer in mind—but it doesn’t hurt to make life easier for agents, too.